By the way, some of the strongest forces pushing for attention to the poor, and towards very-low-wage workers - to the exclusion of people up the income scale who are still pretty insecure - are your good friends, the elite foundations. It's always a patronizing attention, with long roots in upper class charity - but they're not much interested in unions and self-organization.
[WS:] That is precisely my point. I want to puke when I hear of charity. This reminds me of a real story I witnessed in one of my travels. This was an event organized by a bunch of rich people foundations in Mexico and the subject was, surprise, surprise, poverty relief. After hours of bullshit graphs and charts showing the wonderful works of private philanthropy, a work acquaintance of mine, an old British Labourite (before Tony Blair), took the floor and said that all those wonderful models of charity were very impressive, and probably helpful, but he had another, more tried model, "a big fat progressive tax" (I quote). The sight of jaws in the audience dropping was priceless.
BTW, the concepts of charity and philanthropy are considered a dirty word in the Scandinavian countries by many - they believe it is paternalistic, smacking of social inequalities, and contradicting the notion of self-sufficiency.
As to "my" 10-point plan - I did not mean to be innovative - if fact I pretty much reiterated the standard social democratic agenda. The point of it was to shift the discussion from "less fortunate" to the mainstream of society that gets screwed up but, as I correctly observed, receives little sympathy from philanthropists of various stripes, including those on the left.
Wojtek